Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Jack Kerouac

Were he still alive, Jack
Kerouac would today be celebrating his 95th birthday.

That seems an unlikely
age for someone so free, if not reckless.

Kerouac died in1969 at
the age of 47. Basically, he drank
himself to death. By the time of his
death, he had become wildly famous—mostly for his novel On the Road.

Jack married three times
and entertained a string of girlfriends.
A long-time girlfriend described Jack Kerouac as “a very odd person.”

Kerouac had what is
commonly called “dancing feet.” He needed
to keep moving. He seemed incapable of
staying in one place for very long. His writing
style reflected that. On the Road was written in a spontaneous
fashion on a continuous scroll of paper so Kerouac did not have to feed new
sheets of paper into his typewriter as he wrote. It seems largely a myth that On the Road was written over a drug-fueled
three week period of time. Much more
time and craft went into the writing.

Here is my favorite
Kerouac quote: “All of life is a foreign country.”